Basic Role-Playing (BRP), which is the system Call of Cthulhu is based on, is a great alternative to D&D as a roleplaying system. It is much easier to learn and understand, everything is based on percentages, and the system can be as mechanically crunchy or open as the DM prefers.
Yes, this is a major downside of the current medical and legal approach to minors (similar problems are found with abortion services, e.g. laws requiring parental consent for a minor to receive an abortion).
However, this article seems to have an intention and rhetorical goal of setting the record straight on the reality of trans gender affirming care in the context of a moral panic generated through misinformation and manipulation. The article's intended audience is likely skeptical of trans identity and reflexively against gender affirming care for minors, and so it makes sense they emphasize how careful and conservative the current medical approach is to such care.
It's a political asset that the gender affirming care is broken this way because it makes trans-skeptical people more comfortable with it, which should allow it to continue to exist in a world where people operate with the actual facts about the situation, even when they are ignorant or skeptical about the reality of trans identity.
Ultimately the medical establishment does have to be sensitive to the political and cultural context to avoid being shut down, so sometimes it's a matter of making compromises to provide what they can even if it falls short of the ethical and clinical ideal (and let's not mince words, this does mean people will die for political convenience, but the question is how many more would die if they were not conservative in their approach and were shut down completely?)
Naturally a common response to this is to reject the whole project of supporting or depending on the medical establishment's flawed programs, but I think this critique tends to be hyper-individualist and assumes every trans person can overcome the social and financial context they are in and provide their own gender affirming care (or that alternatives to the medical stablishment would be able to fill everyone's needs). Needless to say, rejecting gender affirming care from the medical establishment leaves behind the majority of people needing that care, and has obvious limits and problems such as not being able to realistically offer surgeries and risks legal trouble for everyone involved.
We need to realize how important this fight is for the long-term future of trans people and their health, and how that requires working with the medical establishment and investing in those compromised projects.
It may not be as relevant to you as you have been running for 2 years, but I highly recommend this book as a way to train while avoiding injury, especially to anyone else in this thread who are new runners looking for a resource.
I also had lots of shin splints when I was a beginner runner, and I followed this training program. I essentially just repeated weeks in the program as many times as it took until I was pain free and able to progress to the next week (basically each week incorporates more solid blocks of running and fewer walking breaks, so the first weeks of the program start with the most walking and least running, and the final weeks are when you're just running the whole time).
who said we are? feminism doesn't equate all men as equally privileged nor equally guilty, that's just a myth - feminism to the contrary is pointing out the way patriarchy victimizes men and women, and the way a minority of men perpetuate the violence and system of patriarchy.
Yes, but we continue to fail to communicate - I was never undermining your point about material commitments, I think that point is well-taken, it's the conclusions you draw that I disagree with, i.e. in terms of lumping the capitalist class together with members of the working class ... When I say Che Guevara was a valuable member of the revolution, it is to highlight an example of how valuable class consciousness can be from members of the working class who are more privileged but are not members of the capitalist class.
I wish to resist the tendency to view someone like a software engineer as equivalent to the capitalist class, just because material incentives exist. A software engineer is not a capitalist, they are working class, and the revolution is served by viewing professional and managerial workers as workers, worthy of being included and incorporated into the revolution. Not because they are that way already, I am agreeing with you by suggesting the opposite, that they aren't aware of their status as working class because they have some material incentives, so they align with the wrong class interests.
The right response to this, in my opinion, is to work on raising their class consciousness, while it feels like you are suggesting the opposite (essentially lumping them together and furthering the entrenched idea that they are helplessly aligned with the capitalists and thus basically capitalists themselves).
sure, but it doesn't feel particularly relevant, those people aren't that different from less economically privileged working class folks who defend capitalism despite gaining no material benefit from doing so. The upper middle classes that align that way are still exploited in their jobs and victims of the system they align with, and that's no different than everyone else. Division among the working classes doesn't help our cause, and those middle upper classes would be some of the most valuable allies in cultivating change if their consciousness was raised, since they at least are not completely empty-handed. Think of people like Che Guevara who had such immense influence - he was precisely one of those middle upper class people whose consciousness was raised when he witnessed the American-backed coup in Guatemala.
don't be creepy 🙁